Threads & tropes & not-quite-coincidences that strike me:
- Movies can and do show us quite graphically the ways in which women's and girls' bodies are vessels and channels for possession.
- These chicks love B movies and obscure sci-fi flix more than rom-coms. When we say "trashy" and "schlocky" and "kitschy" and "low-budget" and "low production value," what are we saying about how Hollywood has treated stories that women and girls can relate to?
- Because women's desires can't fit into our social reality, movies that try to bring these desires to life simultaneously a) provide a glimpse into that world, and b) show how, in maintaining social reality, films must, in their final scenes, shut down the world(s) of women's/girls' desires, and foreclose their possibilities (which often means killing heroines, exiling them from town, or recuperating them into normalcy).
- Many of the essays are told from the vantage of a teenage girl viewer, but/and this subjectivity is continuous with that of the woman writing, making for a complex nostalgia (or not-quite-nostalgia, since you're not only looking back on feelings that you still hang onto).
- You're traveling along the Northeast Corridor, trying to think about film, the gaze, and feminism "theoretically," and there's a perv in your face. I can't believe this subject came up in another Chick Flix essay besides mine, grrr.
***********
I recalled that, when I turned 30, the value of my women friends suddenly soared. To be part of a society of women. To be bolstered by it. And I understood why, in the most ancient religions, men sit on one side of the building, and women on the other—sometimes behind a wall or a curtain. It’s not “necessarily” a bad thing. And in the company of my wonderful women friends, I have watched many a cheesy rom-com. Normally, the only way you could make me watch Love Actually is at gunpoint—unless I’m with my girlfriends—sacked out on the floor, eating Chinese take-out, etc.
*
Although controversial, Barbarella is certainly made from the sexual revolution of its day: a melding of pop culture and camp, where the “low art” of comic book meets the capitalism of Hollywood to create an American and French version of the Swinging Sixties set in the future.
--"Barbarella" by Nancy McGuire Roche
*
And, years later, when—even after having witnessed me jumping up and down on the couch, yelling “Go blonde or go home!” as Elle Woods won her Legally Blonde case with her Cosmo Girl wisdom—my husband married me, it was those girls on the beach with me, dressed in blue, the ones who had proudly walked across the quad in their Panhellenic T-shirts and forgiven me—hadn’t they?—for not waving back at them because I was too busy fumbling for a light.
--"Legally Digressive" by Nicole Callihan
*
Railway stations, and the tea rooms in them, which were still ubiquitous in my own time as a grad student in England, are a perfect setting for the lovers' furtive meetings. They are dreary, ordinary, impersonal places, although back then, in even the meanest of them you could get an excellent cup of brewed tea rather than the teabag variety.
--"Brief Encounter" by David Lehman
*
We (American sized, Western eyed?) are uncomfortable with the idea of spirit possession, with the idea of our body not being entirely ours or a spirit invader's or anyone else’s for some measure of time. We admit the de-stablized self, the de-centered self, the fragmented self, the multituded self, but we still feel present and accounted for when we enact and recall and write those encounters out.
--"The Divine Horsemen" by Carrie Lorig
*
Two people who are prone to time warp and disappearance are just two people missing.
--"'Picnic at Hanging Rock': Porn + Botticelli + Frankenstein = Relationship Predictor" by J. Hope Stein
*
Shit can be useful in this way, to mark the line between the sane and the bonkers. A friend and I have a test whenever either one of us teeters on bonkers—“Did you throw your own shit? No? Then you’re fine.”
--"Bridesmaids & Booty Bombs" by Stephanie K. Hopkins
*
My favorite character in the film is Barney Thompson, the very professional manager of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel. He is the pure example of service. He does not have money; he takes care of people who have money. In most of my adult jobs, I’ve tried to channel Barney Thompson. “I’ll get right on that. Absolutely.”
--"Pretty Woman: On Beauty & Belonging" by Ada Limón
*
Because feminism historically assumes the woman its central subject, we take each other to task about the whiteness of that woman, her ableist body, middle-class income, colonial privilege, and so on. We’ve even questioned the woman part of the equation, but we’ve largely continued to assume girlhood an unfortunately abject condition out of which one grows, and make the mistake of imagining it more temporary-than-formative. It’s only recently, with the burgeoning field of girls’ studies, that feminism has begun to ask how girls might be the central subject of this politics.
--"Who Gets the Girl: A Note on Possession Flicks: Drawing Heavily on Kate Durbin’s Demon Notions, My Favorite Movies When I Was 10, and Some Other Stuff " by Danielle Pafunda
*
Designed for space exploration, but—unlike a Ken doll—apparently (generously!) endowed with a penis, Ulysses is the ultimate walking/talking dildo. Sensitive, romantically expressive, and a good gifter to boot, he’ll rent a tux, be your Plus One, and dance with you all night long with the unabashed panache of your fabulous gay boyfriend. Um? Did I mention that he’s programmable?
--"Susan Seidelman’s Making Mr. Right (1987) and Other Space Oddities" by Lee Ann Roripaugh
*
Like a lot of media made in the '80s, Earth Girls Are Easy is a movie that would never get greenlighted today. Sure, the plot is fairly standard by chick flick measures: We follow the story of a beautiful, well-meaning protagonist and her douche canoe of a significant other, who can't seem to keep it in his pants except when it comes to the woman he's meant to love and marry.
--"Where No Valley Girl Has Gone Before: Embracing the Xenosexual in Earth Girls Are Easy" by Nicole Steinberg
*
The sisters are lovable because they are tough, and not really part of the rampant materialism of the time. But they are taken with the candy pop culture part (they're teenagers, how could they not be taken). They dance badly in an empty mall to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," pure cinematic bubble gum (they went to the mall to cheer themselves up and find "practical" clothing). There's a great shot where Regina sets her gun down in a display of stiletto heels in primary colors, all weapons of the 80's.
--"Night of the Comet" by Erin Virgil
*
Finally, the label is given to describe Dana’s personality shift and false confession. She is the mirror image of the Whore, the archetypal “good girl” of the slasher subgenre whose purity (sometimes) allows her to survive the horrors faced by her friends. Moved by Dana’s struggles, Hadley confesses, “It’s so strange. I’m actually rooting for [her]. She’s got so much heart. When you think of all the pain and the punish—”
--"'It’s Women’s Issues': The Cabin in the Woods, Audience Complicity, and Female Power in the Slasher Subgenre" by T.A. Noonan
*
In The Women, the ridiculous ceremony of camp made a plaything of the sorrows of divorce and allowed me to take myself and my role as wife/ex-wife less seriously. Camp, is often dismissed for being so prodigal with feelings that it makes them insignificant, rendering the work of art largely insignificant. It does make them insignificant—in a way. Camp permits you to feel your feelings so far and deep that you feel the feeling right out of them.
--"The Train to Reno and Back: The Women as Rite of Passage" by Tanya Larkin
*
But in Heathers, the female heroine shoots off her sociopathic boyfriend’s middle finger, watches as he blows himself up, and then wrests power away from the mean girls to begin a socially equal utopia in which subaltern fat girls like Martha Dumptruck can be treated like actual human beings. Which is to say, Heathers was the best thing to see when you are a thirteen year old girl with an angry, intellectual bent.
--"Veronica’s Monocle: On Anger and Late Girlhood" by Katharine Jager
*
“And pantless! Get it, guys?” I ask. “We aren’t wearing pants? Just bikins? But we’re doing this movie about pants?”
--"In an Effort to Get America Ferrera to Jump Off a 20-Foot Cliff into the Aegean Sea for a Scene, I Yell Unsupportive Things at Her" by Amber Tamblyn
*
There’s an alternative ending to Thelma & Louise that you can watch on the Internet.
It shows the car falling all the way into the canyon instead of freezing the frame with the car in mid-air, flying outward on an upswing. Watch it. Because you can see the car getting smaller and smaller, as the canyon gets bigger and bigger. And it starts falling at an angle that no longer looks controlled, no longer looks triumphant. Which is exactly how it should look — the logical conclusion that joyful, strong women have no place in this world. The way they freeze the frame with the car on an upswing at the end is why people call Thelma & Louise a “chick flick.” It’s why it’s remembered as a girl power-powered outlaw movie, rather than a horror one.
--"'Let’s Keep Goin’: On Horror, Magic, Female Friendship & Power in Thelma & Louise" by Marisa Crawford
*
If Romy and Michele were a poetry workshop, it might be a noncredit workshop in a midsize city where the students are brilliant and wise and serious but don’t spend too much of their suffering on professionalism. I wish this state of grace were available to more students.
--"The Most Important Thing about Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Poetry" by Joy Katz
*
I would see any movie about the big city or music or artists. Liquid Sky was like all of these rolled into one big missive from the “real world” that I so craved to be a part of, the one I thought I’d find my prince in.
The real world would have to be a city, like New York City, where it was the 1980s too. At the time, the backwash of punk was giving way to the No and New Wave scenes. I had read Edie about twenty times and life was still cheap. It was easy to think a girl like me might find a happy ending there.
--"Liquid Sky: Cinderella, Take 10" by Lisa Janssen
*
And, years later, when—even after having witnessed me jumping up and down on the couch, yelling “Go blonde or go home!” as Elle Woods won her Legally Blonde case with her Cosmo Girl wisdom—my husband married me, it was those girls on the beach with me, dressed in blue, the ones who had proudly walked across the quad in their Panhellenic T-shirts and forgiven me—hadn’t they?—for not waving back at them because I was too busy fumbling for a light.
--"Legally Digressive" by Nicole Callihan
*
Railway stations, and the tea rooms in them, which were still ubiquitous in my own time as a grad student in England, are a perfect setting for the lovers' furtive meetings. They are dreary, ordinary, impersonal places, although back then, in even the meanest of them you could get an excellent cup of brewed tea rather than the teabag variety.
--"Brief Encounter" by David Lehman
*
We (American sized, Western eyed?) are uncomfortable with the idea of spirit possession, with the idea of our body not being entirely ours or a spirit invader's or anyone else’s for some measure of time. We admit the de-stablized self, the de-centered self, the fragmented self, the multituded self, but we still feel present and accounted for when we enact and recall and write those encounters out.
--"The Divine Horsemen" by Carrie Lorig
*
Two people who are prone to time warp and disappearance are just two people missing.
--"'Picnic at Hanging Rock': Porn + Botticelli + Frankenstein = Relationship Predictor" by J. Hope Stein
*
Shit can be useful in this way, to mark the line between the sane and the bonkers. A friend and I have a test whenever either one of us teeters on bonkers—“Did you throw your own shit? No? Then you’re fine.”
--"Bridesmaids & Booty Bombs" by Stephanie K. Hopkins
*
My favorite character in the film is Barney Thompson, the very professional manager of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel. He is the pure example of service. He does not have money; he takes care of people who have money. In most of my adult jobs, I’ve tried to channel Barney Thompson. “I’ll get right on that. Absolutely.”
--"Pretty Woman: On Beauty & Belonging" by Ada Limón
*
Because feminism historically assumes the woman its central subject, we take each other to task about the whiteness of that woman, her ableist body, middle-class income, colonial privilege, and so on. We’ve even questioned the woman part of the equation, but we’ve largely continued to assume girlhood an unfortunately abject condition out of which one grows, and make the mistake of imagining it more temporary-than-formative. It’s only recently, with the burgeoning field of girls’ studies, that feminism has begun to ask how girls might be the central subject of this politics.
--"Who Gets the Girl: A Note on Possession Flicks: Drawing Heavily on Kate Durbin’s Demon Notions, My Favorite Movies When I Was 10, and Some Other Stuff " by Danielle Pafunda
*
Designed for space exploration, but—unlike a Ken doll—apparently (generously!) endowed with a penis, Ulysses is the ultimate walking/talking dildo. Sensitive, romantically expressive, and a good gifter to boot, he’ll rent a tux, be your Plus One, and dance with you all night long with the unabashed panache of your fabulous gay boyfriend. Um? Did I mention that he’s programmable?
--"Susan Seidelman’s Making Mr. Right (1987) and Other Space Oddities" by Lee Ann Roripaugh
*
Like a lot of media made in the '80s, Earth Girls Are Easy is a movie that would never get greenlighted today. Sure, the plot is fairly standard by chick flick measures: We follow the story of a beautiful, well-meaning protagonist and her douche canoe of a significant other, who can't seem to keep it in his pants except when it comes to the woman he's meant to love and marry.
--"Where No Valley Girl Has Gone Before: Embracing the Xenosexual in Earth Girls Are Easy" by Nicole Steinberg
*
The sisters are lovable because they are tough, and not really part of the rampant materialism of the time. But they are taken with the candy pop culture part (they're teenagers, how could they not be taken). They dance badly in an empty mall to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," pure cinematic bubble gum (they went to the mall to cheer themselves up and find "practical" clothing). There's a great shot where Regina sets her gun down in a display of stiletto heels in primary colors, all weapons of the 80's.
--"Night of the Comet" by Erin Virgil
*
Finally, the label is given to describe Dana’s personality shift and false confession. She is the mirror image of the Whore, the archetypal “good girl” of the slasher subgenre whose purity (sometimes) allows her to survive the horrors faced by her friends. Moved by Dana’s struggles, Hadley confesses, “It’s so strange. I’m actually rooting for [her]. She’s got so much heart. When you think of all the pain and the punish—”
--"'It’s Women’s Issues': The Cabin in the Woods, Audience Complicity, and Female Power in the Slasher Subgenre" by T.A. Noonan
*
In The Women, the ridiculous ceremony of camp made a plaything of the sorrows of divorce and allowed me to take myself and my role as wife/ex-wife less seriously. Camp, is often dismissed for being so prodigal with feelings that it makes them insignificant, rendering the work of art largely insignificant. It does make them insignificant—in a way. Camp permits you to feel your feelings so far and deep that you feel the feeling right out of them.
--"The Train to Reno and Back: The Women as Rite of Passage" by Tanya Larkin
*
But in Heathers, the female heroine shoots off her sociopathic boyfriend’s middle finger, watches as he blows himself up, and then wrests power away from the mean girls to begin a socially equal utopia in which subaltern fat girls like Martha Dumptruck can be treated like actual human beings. Which is to say, Heathers was the best thing to see when you are a thirteen year old girl with an angry, intellectual bent.
--"Veronica’s Monocle: On Anger and Late Girlhood" by Katharine Jager
*
“And pantless! Get it, guys?” I ask. “We aren’t wearing pants? Just bikins? But we’re doing this movie about pants?”
--"In an Effort to Get America Ferrera to Jump Off a 20-Foot Cliff into the Aegean Sea for a Scene, I Yell Unsupportive Things at Her" by Amber Tamblyn
*
There’s an alternative ending to Thelma & Louise that you can watch on the Internet.
It shows the car falling all the way into the canyon instead of freezing the frame with the car in mid-air, flying outward on an upswing. Watch it. Because you can see the car getting smaller and smaller, as the canyon gets bigger and bigger. And it starts falling at an angle that no longer looks controlled, no longer looks triumphant. Which is exactly how it should look — the logical conclusion that joyful, strong women have no place in this world. The way they freeze the frame with the car on an upswing at the end is why people call Thelma & Louise a “chick flick.” It’s why it’s remembered as a girl power-powered outlaw movie, rather than a horror one.
--"'Let’s Keep Goin’: On Horror, Magic, Female Friendship & Power in Thelma & Louise" by Marisa Crawford
*
If Romy and Michele were a poetry workshop, it might be a noncredit workshop in a midsize city where the students are brilliant and wise and serious but don’t spend too much of their suffering on professionalism. I wish this state of grace were available to more students.
--"The Most Important Thing about Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Poetry" by Joy Katz
*
I would see any movie about the big city or music or artists. Liquid Sky was like all of these rolled into one big missive from the “real world” that I so craved to be a part of, the one I thought I’d find my prince in.
The real world would have to be a city, like New York City, where it was the 1980s too. At the time, the backwash of punk was giving way to the No and New Wave scenes. I had read Edie about twenty times and life was still cheap. It was easy to think a girl like me might find a happy ending there.
--"Liquid Sky: Cinderella, Take 10" by Lisa Janssen
*
It was an old dream of my own that I remembered, one used to have back when I was a teenager sulking in my room in a house on tree-lined street in a small town in Texas. That dream never involved Tom Hanks. It never involved a man at all. What I wanted then, and found myself wanting again was to stand on my own, to live in New York, to have a career, to be free.
*
Money may not love you back, but saying fuck you to the patriarchy does. I chose a simple geometric diamond to be a bit more subtle. When people ask what it means, I want to say “it means I paid to have a diamond permanently on my wrist,” but instead I usually say “girl’s best friend.”
*
Which leads me to suggest that the quality that differentiates a chick flick from a well-made weepy is that the former can be enjoyed only once while the latter stands up over multiple viewings. In the former, the flaws obscure anything of merit the second time around, in the latter, they don’t matter and may even deepen one’s love of the film.
*
For me, a chick flick is either a movie with a predominantly female cast focusing on what are considered female topics (e.g. gender bias, female puberty, mother-daughter relationships, etc.), or a film that a woman chooses to watch when she wants to feel like she is in love. In the latter designation, the woman will pick a “chick flick” based on her similarities to the female protagonist but more often on her attraction to the male paramour.
*
However, in the darkest onyx of the darkest hour, the darkest place sounds like the song on repeat and the memory of that which is no longer here – a first love. An innocent love. Love used to be like that. The mirror changes, becomes more cruel, but that Teenage Fanclub song sounds exactly the same. The difference between Mavis Gery and most of us, however, is that we have a voice or friends we listen to who say(s), “No fucking way. Have some god damned pride.” Ooooh yeah.
--"Unlikable Protagonist: Young Adult" by Amy Lawless
*
But there is skinny-dipping, low lit spiked-punch teen birthday parties and also abuse, murder, suicide, and abortion. Much of the strife is caused by the adults in the story rather than the restless teens. At times, the movie is a bit creaky and old-fashioned, but as puritanical views of sex and threats against women’s reproductive rights persist, some of its topical issues remain pertinent to our times.
--"Peyton Place" by Jeffery Berg
*
*
But there is skinny-dipping, low lit spiked-punch teen birthday parties and also abuse, murder, suicide, and abortion. Much of the strife is caused by the adults in the story rather than the restless teens. At times, the movie is a bit creaky and old-fashioned, but as puritanical views of sex and threats against women’s reproductive rights persist, some of its topical issues remain pertinent to our times.
--"Peyton Place" by Jeffery Berg
*
What sort of chick flick incorporates five graphic suicides, a father’s immeasurable grief when he discovers his daughter’s been impaled on a fence post and unapologetic use of the male gaze? Okay, scratch the male gaze part, that’s a given.
--"Women and Mental Illness: Why The Virgin Suicides is Still Relevant Today" by Alissa Fleck
*
I asked someone recently how many times he had been in love. I think his answer was three. I said “me too. But, you know, you always want your answer to be one. You don’t want to admit that you’ve let yourself fall so hard more than once.”
--"(500) Days of Summer: A Difficult Thing to See on Someone Else" by Jenny Sadre-Orafai
*
Whether orchard or desert, the finality of female destiny lies with troublesome embodiment, and both sets of women meet their destinies in a place where time sucks but space is okay[.]
--"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" by Sharon Mesmer
*
In which this becomes a given. I- am- afraid. I am afraid and afflicted and can’t stop looking. Consumed and consuming, I want to be afflicted and in love. In the experience of a movie, thoughts and sensations careen about in the weird borderland (where we are both in the time of the movie and the time in which we are watching the movie; “It takes you up and brings you back to the same place”—John Berger) of near complete possession. Reckless concession and rejection. Whooshy fetal dreamstate of becoming.
--"Kill Bill and the Death Code of Motherhood" by Elisabeth Workman
*
In many ways, the film does anticipate the genre that came to be called the chick flick, which, I suppose owes a debt to plots of the nineteenth century and earlier, in which headstrong women are tamed by the right man, the right love. We are told, after all, that once Gillian’s spell on Stewart’s character, Shep, turns into real love on her part, she loses her powers. Pyewacket runs away. She gains the ability to blush and to cry. The plot, then, is what literary theorist Frederic Jameson might call an imaginary resolution to a real ideological contradiction. Here the issue in need of resolution is the power of the single, talented (magical), business-owning woman to disrupt the comfortable certainties of the heterosexual economy.
--"On Bell Book and Candle: Imaginary Resolution and Witchy Excess" by Joanna Penn Cooper
*
So the tear in space and time is sewn back up, and although the girls will, of course, never be the same, we’re left remembering that age-old feminist problem: for all the individual acts of resistance, structural change is still a long way off. The wound in the flesh of the patriarchy closes up and heals.
--"Blowing Up the Law: On Foxfire, Vigilante Feminism, & Abandoned Buildings of Their Own" by me, Becca Klaver
*
As the film progresses, they realize that a singular vision doesn't need to be a limiting one, just like girl culture is made up of all different things, everything. Ichigo can ride bikes and be tough and also pose as a part time model in a white frilly dress – even if she knocks out several cameramen. Momoko can live a life worthy of the Regency period and still hold her own against the toughest girl gang and create her own legend.
--"Kamikaze Girls" by Andrea Quinlan
*
This is not a chick flick–is it–maybe this is a cock flick–maybe this is a bitch flick.
--"Doom Regeneration of the Mid-90s Self" by J. Fossenbell
*
Turns out, at twenty, Stratton’s star persona differed little from her fembot shimmy. Which makes her murder by husband Paul Snider in the same year as Galaxina (1980) all the more alarming, as though he had killed a blonde doll of his own making after leading her to Hollywood from a Dairy Queen in Vancouver.
--"Galaxina" by Rachel Mindell
*
One of the best qualities in Pretty in Pink is how it shows that the outsiders did not want to be a part of the in crowd, even though Andie does, briefly, wonder what it would be like to live in a nice house. Too many more recent films show the outsider character undergoing a transformation that allows him or her to finally be accepted by the in crowd, suggesting that all the outsider really wants is to be a part of the popular group and denying the reality of outsider status as chosen opposition to or chosen alternative to the mainstream.
--"Highschool is a Battlefield: Pretty in Pink" by Gina Myers
*
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I tapped her on the shoulder and began quoting (it’s okay to cringe here) the movie. “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said, mimicking one of Stoltz’s great set-up lines from the movie. Then I intoned (horror) Masterson’s retort: “Yeah, but you can tell how much it’s gonna cost.” Trish chimed in with an iconic line from the finale: “You look good wearing my future.”
--"Some Kind of Wonderful: Because Tomboys Have Feelings, Too" by Cindy Price
*
In Hope Floats, Practical Magic, Forces of Nature and 28 Days, she plays women who begin the film at the pinnacle of success, are knocked down, and then spend the rest of the film climbing back to the top, whatever that means. These transformations are not unique to Bullock, indeed they are universal themes frequently found in literature and film, but she seems particularly drawn to stories of female transformation of the less-than to the better than ever.
--"Mighty Morphing Sandra Bullock" by Natalie Lyalin
*
. . . Or maybe she – Sandra Bullock, not her character Lucy – is dreaming of a better role in a better movie or trying to get old lines from Speed out of her head. Or dreaming of a future moment in Miss Congeniality where she trips over something only to right herself with more confidence than before, a better person – a better actor – for having fallen. Or maybe she was just sitting there filming the scene pissed off. Who knows why? Maybe she’s pissed that Bill Pullman stole the bagel she was toasting that morning at the craft services table. I’m emailing all these things to you. From the Alps. From the fucking Alps.
--"WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING we accidentally watched a Sandra Bullock movie twice in a row (based on the memory of a true story)" by Trish Harnetiaux
*
There's a disconnect, for women at least, between this process of becoming an interesting, mature self, and the fact that we don't usually become this person while still in our high school bodies. Even if we were to meet this stripped down and shimmering Self, rip off the glasses to reveal something satisfying, adequately representative of the myriad things passing through us and the sensation of motion and looking out when we close our eyes alone, the Self of sediment—she would not inhabit the body in which I first became aware of her, of my obligation to her, this Self that would fail to be seen by anyone else and which I somehow must promote in the world. This is what lies behind that cringe when we read our high school diaries, their unapologetic declarativeness, shoddy performativity, their belief in their right to exist and to be seen, and that does not, finally, unite with an actual person existing in the world. The pages of trying on new signatures, new slang, confidence and religion and pathos in various shades of gel pen.
--"Oh my gosh, I’ve got total Diet Coke mouth: Aftertaste, not Transformation, in She's All That" by Megan Boatright
*
I was hooked on the cool, smart romance of it all–the nerdy girl pursued by average guy with just the right amount of geek and gorgeousness.
--"Say Anything" by Elisa Wright
*
It was if John Hughes was saying, “Look, Dava, you may not have a boyfriend now, or in a few years or maybe not even until your graduate college, (I had my first actual boyfriend at age 22) but it will happen. It is possible.” And that’s the kind of thing every average, void-like, not too special high school girl like me wanted to hear.
--"A Heroine for the Common Woman: Sixteen Candles" by Dava Krause
*
I don’t care that there’s not much sympathy in here for women. I’m not sure sympathy is what we need.
--"3 Women" by Laura Theobold
*
One measure for determining what constitutes a chick flick is an affirmative answer to the question: Does the movie provoke weeping in women in a similar way that porn incites orgasm in men? [...] To watch Steel Magnolias without a Camp sensibility, without “converting the serious into the frivolous” as Camp encourages, is perhaps to reduce the film to that weepy chick-flick porn category.
--"Watching Steel Magnolias with Susan Sontag" by LB Thompson
*
I am reminded that rom-coms and the act of watching them are ritualistic. There’s a pattern to be followed. Renewal by the end. A community that is formed or forming. Conversely, I wonder if lonesomeness and loneliness are the by-products of our lack of meaningful ritual—the kind of ritual that allows for who and what we truly are, in all of our ambiguities.
--"On the Island of Midnight Margaritas" by Lea Graham
*
I am left wondering what if those around her didn’t react with such resistance by saying, “You’re nuts! Pull yourself together!” What if she was permitted to dance and feel and for fuck’s sake eat ice cream when she wanted to without all the screaming men, who to be quite frank are the ones who seem a bit hysterical to me, in the films?
--"Tipping the Core: the Ambiguous Celluloid of Gena Rowlands in the films of John Cassavetes" by Amanda Deutch
*
Megan Cavanaugh’s Marla Hooch, on the other hand, is the character we are taught not to take at face value. She is the team’s ugly girl, originally rejected from the league for not being enough of a “dolly” who becomes becomes the star hitter after Kit and Dottie refuse to get on the train without her. This, of course, after Dottie refuses to play without Kit – a strange litany of the more attractive girl supporting the less attractive girl. A story I’ve never seen played out in real life.
*
--"This Used to be My Playground: A Memory-Meditation on A League of Their Own and the Poetics of the Ugly Girl" by Jessica Rae Bergamino
*
If one definition of a “chick flick” is “a film that shows a woman displaying a high level of ass-kicking ability,” then Nightmare 4 fits the bill. On the surface, it is a generic 80s slasher film where a supernatural monster kills off a group of people. But it is also the tale of a young female’s journey into not only adulthood, but also into the realm of the superhuman, the divine.
--“I Guess this is My Own War:" The Rise and Fall of Alice Johnson as Champion in A Nightmare on Elm St. 4 and 5 by Scott Fynboe
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Oh shut up you know I love Princess Leia and you know I love Han Solo and you know I love Captain Picard. You know I would blow up a fucking planet if you gave me a big enough gun. All I’m saying is fuck you if those are the only great stories or profound life lessons you can think of. All I’m saying is if it’s so easy for you to dismiss aesthetics (sparkle) or emotion (moan) or the everyday (high school) or adolescent female subjectivity (does my boyfriend like me) you might be a misogynist. If you can totally dismiss Twilight I think you might have to dismiss Jeanne Dielman, and if you dismiss Jeanne Dielman you can’t hide behind the Mormonism anymore, you can’t hide behind art, you can’t pretend to be a feminist. You think women and women’s stuff are boring. That’s fine, so do a lot of people.
--"Breaking Dawn in Sixteen Pieces" by Caolan Madden
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And this is what moves this film about two guys on the lam beyond slapstick farce into chick-flick territory. In the end, Some Like it Hot is a movie about friendship: Jerry and Joe’s, yes, but about Daphne and Josephine’s unintended friendship with Sugar, which causes them to relate to her as a person, not a conquest, and later, in Joe’s case, to understand her vulnerability and choose not to exploit it.
--“Some Like It Hot” by Laura Orem
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Maureen: Oh wow! Maybe David Bowie has a whole castle full of 14 year-old girls who hated babysitting so much they called on the Goblin King to take their brothers away. Like Bluebeard. For the tween set.
Rachel: Yes...you can spirit a lot of ladies away with pants like that. Plus he turns into a freaking beautiful owl.
--Responsible Magic: Maureen and Rachel Thorson in conversation on Labyrinth
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Dirty Dancing was the perfect escape for girls like me - no, it was made for girls like me. Baby, played by Jennifer Grey, was a sister in teendom. A foil to her arrogant, beauty queen of an older sister, Lisa, Baby started the movie as a smart, not classically pretty, uncoordinated nerd. Not the character I aspired to be like, but the one I was.
--"Dirty Dancing (Baby, Oh, Baby!)" by Catherine Esposito Prescott
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But here’s the thing: Brigitte wants to change Ginger back, sure—back from being a lycanthrope, killing the neighborhood dogs, bullies, high school faculty; but mostly back from being a Hot Topic-wearing, pot-smoking, boy-fucking young woman. Back to the girl who was her other half. She wants her sister back.
--"Blood & Guts in High School: Ginger Snaps" by Jenn McCreary
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As an ars-poetic envelope, the “breaking through to lucidity” cliché feels useful. If it’s soap-operatic, so be it—the action is dramatic. Those moments of euphoric clarity that writing induces are what I live for (“I mean the moment / a woman exhales / and slides beneath / her mounds of bubbles”). I feel shame for making these references, but maybe cheapness is a way through the wall. The Notebook is notorious for inducing weeping (yes, I did), and if I could put my finger on and employ in writing what it is, exactly, that unlooses the mind and adheres the body to what is the matter, then I could happily die in my own arms.
--"Slingshot Ouroboros: The Poetics of The Notebook" by Kate Colby
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Nica learns that she expects Alex to take care of her the way “men” are supposed to take care of their “women.” How is one supposed to rectify these two forces, which are generally understood as being oppositional: fierce female independence and the desired to be sheltered and protected. Which leads to an even further inquiry: should these forces even be rectified? Do they have to be in order for both of them to exist?
--"Make Me Feel Safe: The Loneliest Planet and Unspoken Vulnerability" by Jackie Clark
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So imagine then, a movie that centers around a female friendship where the origin of one of the friends is always held in some state of doubt, where both characters explore each other’s identities -- but due solely to their own whims and always on their own terms -- a movie where the only brushes with patriarchal oppression occur within these out-of-character explorations and are each summarily dealt with in a very funny, cathartic way.
--“Paris Belongs to Them: Friendship, Empowerment, and Good Times in Celine and Julie Go Boating” by Dan Coffey
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The movie uses humor to explore how a young woman without a strong female figure in her life might form her identity. And even though I wasn’t a nomad like Vivian, nor a young woman, I could relate to her awkward moments in learning about the world.
--"Don’t Tell Anybody About This, OK? It’s Just a Building Thing: Slums of Beverly Hills" by Nate Logan
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The tank, with its four glass walls becomes the perfectly confined space for a performance of femininity. The tank is all drama, all boredom, all the time. The tank is a T.V. and it’s the camera’s frame too. In a sense, every shot of a movie, is a kind of holding tank, the fish and actors on display. We watch and sometimes we trace our fingers along the glittering, flitting outline of their fish bodies.
--"Dancing on My Own" by Carley Moore
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In the initiation scene, Moondoggie shoves Gidget’s head under water, telling her, “Go down and cut some kelp.” Gidget tries to be a good sport: “Gee, fellas, this great fun!” He sadistically shoves her under again, snickering, “I’m glad you like it!” The surfers laugh until she doesn’t come back up, and Moondoggie has to rescue her again from a kelp bed. That’s twice with the kelp beds.
I propose we make “kelp cutter” code for a terrible date, i.e. “How was your OK Cupid date?” “A total kelp cutter—I got crabs.”
--"Cold Cash & Legs of Lamb: Shooting the Shame Curl with Gidget" by Jennifer L. Knox
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The idea for the film was not the screenwriters’, it was Jane Fonda’s. Resnick, in a December 3, 2008 interview with Afterellen.com, noted that Fonda “had a lot of statistics about clerical workers and things that she wanted to say politically, and she wanted it to be couched in terms of a comedy.”
--"9to5" by Jen Benka
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--"Amelie" by Carrie HunterEveryone’s quirks narrated,silly things they hate,(like it is the silly things we hatethat makes life livable).
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I was clicking my pen; jotting notes. Funny how “chick flick” wants me to be both embarrassed and emboldened. We’re to own our completely mainstream desires as defiant, irreverent pleasures.
Just as I wrote that last phrase I realized I was being watched. Closely. The man I’d made room for in the two-seater was looming over my shoulder. He was reading my notes.
--"Becooched" by Marion Wrenn
This essay series should be a book.
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